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Symplectic Elements v3.6

Research Information Software

User/Administrator Guidance

September 2010

Symplectic Elements

Guidance Notes

Introduction

The University made the strategic decision to purchase Symplectic in 2008 in order to address the likely requirements of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), both to gather full details of research outputs, and to deal with any bibliometric data that STEM[1] panels may request. At their Hilary Term 2010 meeting the University’s Research Committee’s Research Information Management sub-committee received a paper that outlined Symplectic’s operation and capabilities. The sub-committee agreed that the tool could be of value to academics in a broad range of disciplines, and endorsed the proposal that Symplectic should be offered to all University faculties and departments.

Background – what does Symplectic do?

Symplectic is a software tool that helps to record bibliographic and other information about research outputs. It is designed to be easy to use, and was initially developed to enable Imperial College to submit its return to RAE2008. Approximately 800 academic staff in eight Oxford STEM departments currently use the system, and it was piloted in the Social Sciences Division in Trinity Term 2010.

With the support of local administrators, individual researchers (or their nominees) use the tool to maintain records of their own research publications, which are held on a central Oxford database. By offering the system to researchers throughout the University,the Planning and Resource Allocation Section (PRAS) expects that departments and faculties will be able to gather details of research outputs for the REF in a more efficient manner than was the case for RAE2008 saving time and administrative resources.

How Symplectic works

Symplectic helps colleagues to maintain information about their research publications such as books, chapters, journal articles and conference proceedings, electronically and in one place. Each researcher is provided with an online account, via which they create and amend records held on a secure Oxford database. The system can also be used to maintain records of other less tangible research outputs, but it is foremost an output/publication record keeping tool. It is not intended to capture information about prizes, fellowships, or similar features of research careers. The records are held in a consistent format, and can retain rich bibliographic information about each output.

Each colleague can manage individually his or her online account. The interface is intuitive and simple to operate; anyone who uses online banking or has used online research application systems will recognise the format. Login is via the University Single Sign-on (Webauth/SSO) and colleagues will need to know their username and password (the same as for OSS or Weblearn). Alternatively, users can delegate maintenance of their account to other staff familiar with their research. System support/delegation can also be structured to reflect sub- or cross-department/faculty groupings, as required.

As well as offering a simple interface for manually entering bibliographic information, the software provides a number of other tools to reduce additional record keeping. In particular these include access to extensive journal and citations online databases from which the software can harvest publications data, the ability to download details of books and chapters from the Google Books database, and the ability to import from bibliographic software such as Reference Manager and Endnote.

Symplectic currently has access to the following online publications databases:

Web of ScienceCombines seven databases including the Arts & Humanities Citations Index, and the Conference Proceedings Citation Index: Social Sciences & Humanities. Over 1,500 journals are included (with coverage of some foreign language titles).[2]

ScopusProvides access to over 1,700 titles within Arts and Humanities disciplines, although substantial overlap with Web of Science is likely.[3]

PubMedIncludes more than 19 million citations for biomedical articles from the MEDLINE database and life science journals. MEDLINE provides citations, abstracts and some full text articles on life sciences and biomedical topics from 1951 onwards.

arXivOpen access to around 600,000 electronic pre-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.

DBLPProvides bibliographic information on major computer science journals and proceedings. Primarily focused on database systems and logic programming (DBLP), the service is being expanded toward other fields of computer science.

A key aspiration for a fully-deployed Symplectic system is that output/publication information need be entered only once for all University uses because Symplectic can send data to other systems, such as ORA (the University’s electronic repository) or faculty websites and staff profiles[4]. This guidance, however, focuses upon its core bibliographic data functions.

PART 1 of this document provides step-by-step guidance to introduce new users to the main software features. PART 2 provides further detail on additional software functions for both academic and administrative users.

PART 1

The following section provides step-by-step guidance for administrators and academic users on how to log-in tothe software and access its core features. Pages 9 onwards provide figures to which the following notes refer. For example, figure 3 on page 10 will be referred to as (p10,3). Additional support and advice on all aspects of the software may be sought by emailing queries .

Guidance – Core Features

Accessing the system

Once formally registered with the system, individuals have a single account configured to their needs and accessible via their normal Oxford Webauth/SSO usernames and passwords. However, for the purpose of this guidance, a number of illustrative accounts have been created that anybody can log-in to.

  • Direct a web browser towards , and click ‘Login via a different authenticating authority’, then use either‘sandbox2’, ‘sandbox3’ or ‘sandbox4’ in the username field, and the word ‘sandbox’ for the password.[5]

Publication lists

The first screen provides a quick summary of the numbers and types of publication records the account contains. The software actually maintains three independent publication lists in each account: Approved, Declined, and Pending publications. The two columns of values on the first screen refer to the Approved and the Pending lists.

  • Click the ‘Publications’ button in the upper left corner of the panel containing the columns of values (p9,1).Then click the ‘Pending Publications’ button in the upper centre of the screen (p10,2).

The software can be configured to search its online databases for publications belonging to you, and when it finds something, all the available information is added to a new record in this Pending list. Each item in the lower part of the screen is a separate research output which is awaiting verification of authorship by the user (there may only be one or two in this illustrative account). Clicking the ‘red cross’ or ‘green tick’ buttons (p10,3) to the right of any record will move the record to the Declined or Approved lists, respectively. As one accepts/rejects items in the Pending list, the Approved list becomes one’s verified publication record, and the Declined list ensures that subsequent database searches don’t return rejected publications to the Pending list.

  • In any publication record (in any of the three lists), click ‘add/edit manual record’ in the upper right (p10,4).

Bibliographic fields

This page shows the variety of information that Symplectic can hold about any one publication. The available fields vary for different publication types. For example, ISBN is included for Books, but ISSN is used for Journal articles. Many fields such as ‘Title’, ‘Authors’ and ‘Notes’ are common to all publication types. The ‘DOI’ field (towards the bottom of the Journal article fields) can store a DOI[6]web link to the article full text, which then appears as a link button in the Publication lists (p10,5). The ‘Status’ field (p11,6) may be helpful when adding records in advance of their completion or publication – allowing users to include in their accounts the publishable outcomes they anticipate from current research activity.

  • Now return to the first page by clicking on the ‘home’ button in the top left of the screen (p11,7).

Output/Publication types

The list in the upper half of the screen shows just the more commonly used publication types; clicking ‘Others’ in the bottom left corner of this panel (p9,8) will reveal the rest.

New publication records can be added (directly to the Approved list) through this list simply by clicking any of the ‘Add new ---’ links to the right of the publication types. Aside from ‘Add new Book’ and ‘Add new Chapter’, all of these work in a similar way: displaying the appropriate bibliographic fields as discussed above. All of these screens contain a few mandatory fields, indicated by a red asterisk to their left (p11,9), and you must click ‘save’ in the bottom right (p11,10) to add the record to the Approved publications list.

  • Return to the home page, if you have navigated away from it, for the next stage.

ISBN Import

The ‘Add new Book’ and ‘Add new Chapter’ links from the home page differ slightly from the others because the system offers to automatically populate some of the bibliographic fields by querying the Google Books online database. To use this feature one needs to provide an ISBN.

  • Click ‘Add new Book’, and in the ISBN field (on the next page) enter 978-2605003006 (or any other ISBN you have to hand). Click ‘search’, then click the arrow to the right of the appropriate search result (p12,11).

All information held by Google Books about the publication is imported to the appropriate fields. For Book Chapters (which work in the same way as Books), one would then amend the ‘Title’ (if different from the book title), ‘Chapter numbers’ and ‘Pagination’ fields before adding the record to the Approved publication list, by clicking ‘save’ at the bottom.

More information can be added to publication records at any time, so creating records with just the few mandatory fields can be quick, and provides a good framework for filling-out the detail later.

Automated Search

As mentioned above, the software can be configured to periodically search online databases for publications attributable to you, and add them to your Pending list. Symplectic uses various search parameters to match publications with your account, and these parameters are summarised in the lower half of the home page.

  • From the home page, click ‘Search settings’ on the left, half way down the screen (p9,12). On the next screen, to the right of ‘Default search terms’ click the small ‘+’ button (p13,13) to expand this panel.

Entries in these fields are used by the system to interrogate the publication databases to which it has access. In most cases, just a single entry under ‘Name variants’ is provided, and this entry must precisely match the way one’s name appears in author lists in your articles, if the system is to capture your publications. Where one’s name is fairly common, entries under ‘Addresses’ are used to narrow the search to places or organisations relevant to one’s career. Very rarely is there any need to adjust anything on this screen other than the ‘Name variants’ and ‘Addresses’ fields.

Which databases the software searches is indicated by the tick boxes lower-down the Search settings page (p13,14). The utility offered by this search feature depends upon the accuracy of the search parameters provided, and the degree to which these five databases contain journals relevant to one’s academic discipline.

More information can be added to that received from the external databases, just as with manually-entered publication records.

PART 1 – Summary

Working-through the preceding guidance should adequately demonstrate the software methods and environment, but users are encouraged to explore the software further. No action available to the user or administrator within the system will damage the Oxford system or cannot be undone. Guidance for other significant software features is provided in PART2, below, and all questions should be emailed to .

PART 2

Guidance – Additional User Features

Information on a number of additional tools available to Symplectic users and administrators are listed below. This section follows-on from the guidance relating to core software features above. Full proprietary documentation covering all aspects of the Symplectic system is available on request.

User profile

  • Having logged-in to a ‘sandbox#’ academic user account as described on page 3 above, from the home page, click ‘user profile’ in the top-left corner of the screen (p9,15).

This page provides a convenient summary of user data and research output information. The upper ‘User profile’ area of the screen is self explanatory, apart from ‘Primary group’. This indicates the group of users the account belongs to in the Symplectic system which may not match University organisation names.‘H-Index’ is a statistic primarily used in STEM subjects, which relates citation counts and journal impact factors.

The rest of the user profile page is straight forwards: a simple chart showing publication frequency, and a list of the user’s Approved outputs/publications in chronological order.

Account delegation

  • From the home page, click ‘delegate’ near the top of the screen (p9,16).

This page allows you to grant access to your Symplectic account to other members of staff. Delegates are able to operate the account in every way just as you do (including adding/removing delegates). These individuals need to be registered with Symplectic themselves, so in most cases you’ll need to contact yourdepartment/faculty/group Symplectic contact to have them added to the system.

Delegates, once logged-in to the system, should look for the ‘impersonate’ button at the top of the home page. Clicking this will reveal a list of other user accounts to which the delegate has been granted access.

Importing from other software

  • From the home page, click ‘my elements’ at the top of the screen (p9,17), then click ‘import’ on the following screen.

Reference Manager and EndNote software applications can export bibliographic information in .ris file format, and MathSciNet uses .bib files. Having prepared .ris or .bib files using these other tools, the Symplectic ‘import’ page will manage their conversion to Symplectic records. The Symplectic developers have provided very detailed guidance on how to carry out this conversion process to produce good quality Symplectic records and avoid duplicating existing records. Guidance and assistance is available on request .

Publication lists (more)

  • Navigate to the Pending publication list.

There are a few particularly useful features on this page (not mentioned earlier) that make it easier to manage publication lists.

In the upper ‘view’ panel, clicking the ‘+’ button to the right of ‘Filter on’ offers the option to change the number of records presented on each page.

On any of the publication records in the lower part of the screen, clicking the ‘eye’ button on the right hand side will mark the record as hidden. This means that the record will not be returned in searches performed by other users, and the record can be excluded from appearing on websites (if the faculty uses this feature).

The symbol in the bottom right corner of each record indicates its source. If Symplectic found the record in an online database search then the symbol will match the database logo (the orange swirl for Web of Science, for example). If the record was imported or added manually then the symbol will be a gear (cog). More information on data source(s) can be found by clicking ‘Data sources (x)’ above each record.

Clicking and dragging the blue arrow symbols in the top left of any record allows you to change the order in which the records are presented.

Refining Search Settings

The system carries-out searches of its online databases every two weeks for all users. However, if you amend your search settings (remembering to press the ‘save’ button at the bottom), then the system will schedule a search for publications relating to your account within the following two hours. This time lag is frustrating when trying to improve search results. The fastest solution is to visit the web interfaces for each of the online resources that Symplectic uses[7], and determine what search parameters return the correct publications. Add these parameters to Symplectic and the next time the search runs, all of the bibliographic information will be imported to your account.

Explore

  • From any screen, click ‘explore’ on the blue bar at the top, then click ‘search the database’ on the following page.

This area allows users to search for research outputs/publications authored by other Oxford researchers. There’s a lot on this page, but it’s all fairly self explanatory. Clicking ‘search’ creates a list of search results at the bottom of the screen (this isn’t always obvious).